Territorializing faith: neighbourhood life cycle enquiry as a tool for capturing demographic change

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on a conflict over an urban resource between secular and Ultra-Orthodox Jews in an Israeli city. It demonstrates the intersection between cultural conflicts, urban processes and politics, and stresses the changing urban dynamics over time and the way conflicting rationales of two competing groups are formed. It highlights how demographic change, initiated and driven by external social and political forces, bears local ramifications in political and power relations. Analysis of the major players and processes (i.e., political power, decision-making and mobilization) attests to the way inter-group tensions and rivalries at the national level are manifested at the local level, and consequently determine the local social reality. The neighbourhood’s life cycle indicates the symbolic as well as the ideological aspects of demographic change and the territorialization of faith through political power and decision-making of the local governance.